Insulating glass units employed in windows and doors commonly are manufactured by sandwiching a peripheral spacer between aligned, parallel sheets of glass. One such construction is shown in Larsen, U.S. Pat. No. 5,439,716. The finished units are packaged and shipped to another location in which the glass units are provided with appropriate frames to form finished windows and doors.
It may become necessary to replace the old, worn or damaged windows of a building such as a residence at the same time. In this process, all of the required unframed glass units, of varying sizes, may be produced, packaged, and shipped by one company to another which will add the appropriate frames. For efficiency and economy of manufacture, insulating glass units may be vertically stacked or packaged serially with respect to one another in a particular order as determined by the company that does the framing. In the framing operation, frames are provided in the same order and are automatically matched with the appropriately sized glass units as the glass units are serially removed from their shipping container. Thus, the glass units desirably are arranged in a shipping container in accordance with the needs of the company that provides the frames; this, in turn, may require large glass units to be packaged directly adjacent smaller units.
A problem arises when a stack of glass units is transported. It is difficult to package the stacked glass units so that smaller units, which may be sandwiched between larger units, are supported against breakage. When the glass units are transported, as by truck, the vertically held glass units are subjected to substantial bouncing and jolting. The smaller glass units thus can move with respect to the larger units, and substantial breakage can result. If the glass units are stacked against one another so that they either touch each other or are separated by paper or cardboard spacers, the resulting stack may be wrapped with a heat-shrinkable plastic film or the like in an attempt to hold the stack together and prevent the individual glass units from moving with respect to one another. If the stack is wrapped loosely, movement of the smaller glass units with respect to the larger units may yet occur, with consequent breakage. However, if the stack is wrapped tightly, the size disparity of the units may lead to breakage as edges of the smaller units are pressed laterally into the unsupported center areas of the larger units.
To support vertically aligned glass sheets against breakage during transportation, various containers have been proposed. One such container comprises a floor, an end wall supported at right angles to the floor, and a series of parallel rods extending from an upper edge of the wall to a lower, forward edge of the floor, the rods being spaced from one another by a distance enabling glass sheets to be inserted between the rod pairs. Although containers of this type are appropriate for conveying vertically aligned glass sheets for very short distances, as across the flat floor of a factory, they are quite inadequate to support glass units against breakage during shipment when the containers are subjected to bumps and jolts, since the individual glass units can move upwardly and forwardly parallel to their planes as well as from side-to-side. The container itself, as described, can be wrapped horizontally with a heat-shrinkable plastic film in an effort to stabilize the sheets, but if sheets of different sizes and shapes are intermingled, only the larger sheets will be supported.
It is an object of the invention to provide a shipping container for vertically positioned glass units in which each glass unit is supported against movement in its plane.
It is another object of the invention to provide a transport container for vertically positioned planar articles such as glass units which not only supports each of the articles against movement in its plane, but in addition enables articles of varying sizes and shapes to be positioned next to one another in a predetermined order to facilitate subsequent framing or other manufacturing operations.
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a shipping container for vertically positioned planar articles in which each of the articles is individually supported against movement in its plane and can be individually and easily inserted into and removed from the container without disturbing the other articles.